Elections 2023: Benin votes … then and now
We have a Parliament in Benin. The question is democracy. The first time I visited Benin, elections were a pipe dream, but today democracy is still on the line.
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world, the focus today is the year’s first…the keystone African nation of Benin.
This is the face of democracy in Benin, a nation that was once and remains aspirationally a democratic bastion in sub-Saharan Africa. President Patrice Talon was not on the ballot this time, but his political forces were. And not surprisingly, they won this past Sunday in the world’s first national elections of 2023, whose results were just divulged today.
For much of its existence as an independent, post-colonial nation, Benin has whipsawed between autocracy and a form of democracy that might be only vaguely recognized in much of the western world. As Africa News put it recently: “President Patrice Talon, elected in 2016 and then re-elected in 2021, is regularly accused of having made an authoritarian shift in the name of development in a country once hailed for the dynamism of its democracy. But its primary opponents now live abroad, targeted by court cases in Benin. And several journalists have been arrested and a foreign journalist was expelled in recent years. The Bloc Républicain, President Talon's party, has its stronghold in the north of Benin, as does Les Démocrates, former President Thomas Boni Yayi's party. Another party, the Progressive Union for Renewal, also supports President Talon. The two men are former allies—Talon, a cotton tycoon, bankrolled Boni Yayi's successful presidential runs in 2006 and 2011. But they fell out in late 2012, prompting Talon to leave the country for three years, accused of trying to poison Boni Yayi.” Now Talon is very much back and in power.
Today’s results were hardly unexpected. As Reuters reported Wednesday from Cotonou: “The two parties already in power—the Union Progressiste le Renouveau and the Bloc Republicain—came first and second with 37.6% and 29.2% of the vote respectively….The Democrates party linked to President Patrice Talon's predecessor and rival Thomas Boni Yayi came third with 24.0%. None of the remaining four parties competing for the 109 seats gathered enough votes to meet the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation.”
But perhaps of overwhelming importance, fewer than 39% of Benin’s population cast their ballots. In many nations, particularly in Africa, when there is not a requirement to vote and the results are pretty much ordained, this is the kind of turnout that we have seen. And indeed, the Progressiste and Republicain parties will retain a firm majority in the 109-seat parliament.
Clearly none of this has posed a threat to the rule of Talon, who the last time around suddenly reversed his pledge not to stand for re-election, winning overwhelmingly. The question now is whether he will honor his pledge not to stand again in 2026. During his rule, he has cracked down on most political opposition. Although he has denied violating human rights, Freedom House reported that while Benin “had been among the most stable democracies in sub-Saharan Africa, President Talon began using the justice system to attack his political opponents….Deadly police violence at political protests, arrests of activists, and other restrictions on civil liberties have become increasingly problematic in recent years.
“Not so long ago, Benin was seen as a model democracy, where peaceful regime changes had been the norm since 1990, and civil liberties were highly respected,” Olivier van Beeman and Flore Nobime wrote in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian daily. “But with the election of Patrice Talon, a wealthy businessman who made his fortune in the cotton trade, this has rapidly changed. He has muzzled the press and banned political opponents, to such an extent, that the National Assembly doesn’t contain a single opposition member.” Now there will be just a handful of opposition voices.
The reality is that throughout its history since it received its independence August 1, 1960 from France’s colonial empire where it had served as the territory of Dahomey, a unit of French West Africa and earlier as an outpost of French trading for more than two centuries, Benin has fluctuated between democracy and autocracy.
But the story of my first visit to Benin may be more telling as a suggestion of just how far Benin has come.
Shortly before 3 am on August 26, 1985, the phone rang in my Paris bedroom on the rue de Solferino, across the street from the headquarters of France’s ruling Socialist Party. It was the CBS News foreign desk in New York. “There’s been a coup in Nigeria,” the overnight producer announced to me. “There’s a charter waiting at Le Bourget [the Paris airfield where Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of Saint Louis in 1927]. The Brauer crew is assembling the gear. [Jimmy] Clevenger is your producer. Wheels up at 5 am. Evening News wants a piece.” I was used to the drill by that time. And we were indeed air borne at 5 o’clock, our tiny charter jet packed to the doors (including the WC) with huge metal cases of camera gear, lights, audio equipment and video cassettes. This was 1985 after all.
Six hours later, we set down at the tiny desert airfield of Tamanrasset, the sprawling oasis in the southern Algerian desert that was the routine refueling spot for private jets headed from Europe into sub-Saharan Africa.
It boasted a single runway, a shack that doubled as the control tower and two stalls out back that contained evil-smelling squat toilets over holes in the desert. Still, they were welcome as the toilet on our plane was utterly inaccessible behind the crew’s gear. We spent a minimum time on the ground, though a German crew of a medevac plane parked nearby did plead with us to contact their people back home and emphasize that they needed clearance to take off. There’d been some slip up in paperwork, and they’d been stuck in Tamanrasset for three days. God only knew what happened to the patient they’d been dispatched to pick up.
Two hours after landing we were airborne again, headed south toward Lagos. But we soon hit a snag. Three hours before landing, the pilot came back with the unwelcome news that the officers behind the coup had sealed Nigeria’s land, sea, and air borders. All incoming aircraft were being diverted.
The nearest airport was in the neighboring capital of Benin. Which is where we landed. The problem was that no one knew we were coming. And as it happened, Benin was at that moment a thoroughly Marxist—i.e. communist—state, perhaps one of the most determinedly communist nations in Africa. So, a planeload of American television network folk who suddenly descended on them in the absence of any invitation, certainly without any visa, was hardly welcome. They refueled our plane and sent us packing.
Two countries to the east—past Togo and Ghana—was the Côte d’Ivoire, in those days quite friendly to France, a deeply francophone nation. So, when our plane arrived, our two pilots and our French camera crew were welcomed, hopped in a car, and were whisked off to the luxurious Sofitel Abidjan Hotel. Clevenger and I, however, were not quite so fortunate. In the absence of visas, we were held at the airport as effectively illegal immigrants, thrown into a jail cell maintained by the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, known affectionately as Papa Houphouët, though certainly not to us. The cell was, how shall I put it, hardly a congenial spot to pass a night. There were roaches scuttling along the floor that we could have thrown a saddle across and ridden out of the room. Had it not been locked. Moreover, as it happened our jailer, a large somewhat ferocious African gent, took a bit of a shine to Jimmy Clevenger, who had a girlfriend back in Paris and had little interest in expanding his intimate connections into sub-Saharan Africa. Just as both of us were beginning to despair, an American showed up in suit and tie, identifying himself as a cultural officer from the United States Embassy in Abidjan. Our camera crew had clearly been busy. The American diplomat couldn’t do much for us, but at least was prepared to sit with us through the night. Clevenger was especially delighted, if that’s not too strong a word, for being rescued from the amorous interests of the warden.
In the morning, our crew and pilots bustled into the airport and declared that we were ready to take off. They’d spent a lavish night, feasting on two-inch thick sirloins at the Sofitel, with a couple of bottles of vintage Bordeaux from the wine cellar, all but oblivious to the details of our ordeal. The foreign desk in New York had roused the State Department in Washington, so we were cleared for takeoff. The landing was something else. Nigeria remained buttoned up. So, it was back to Benin.
This time, however, we were expected. George Moose, who would later gain some considerable renown as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Bill Clinton during the period of the Rwanda genocide, was at that moment the U.S. Ambassador to Benin. He’d been apprised of our plight by the State Department and had rousted his buddy the Minister of the Interior. Both of them were waiting in the grass-hut pavilion that served as the arrival terminal. And we began our negotiations.
Benin was not interested in finding itself featured on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. We were quite frank about our interest in the region not extending beyond Nigeria and chronicling the coup that was in the process of working itself out. So, we arranged a condominium. We could stay, quite comfortably, in the French-owned Novotel Cotonou as long as we cared to remain. In return, we pledged not to film anything in Benin. Which is precisely what we did. Once a day, we loaded our camera and crew into a car and traveled 20 kilometers east along the coast highway past Lake Nokoue to the border crossing at Owodé, only to be told, still no entry. Back we’d go to the beautiful sand beach on the Gulf of Guinea.
A week later, when Nigeria final opened up, CBS in all its wisdom sent in another crew from London, so we headed back to Paris. Our hosts in Benin seemed hardly disappointed to see us depart.
Indeed....so many more where those came from !
LIfe as a foreign correspondent !!
Whew !!! School of hard knocks that do support a gripping tale